Such a deep commitment to an evidence-based technology approach to business is super surprising from a company that says its corporate purpose is "To glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us..." That sort of dissonance is always so confusing to me.
Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
191–200 of 401 posts
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
...the card is highly likely to reuse the same sectors over and over. One would have expected this to be an area of focus for RasPi developers? Surely some driver could be updated to avoid this?
The Linux kernel in raspbian treats the SD card like a normal block device. I'm not aware of any special optimization for write wear leveling at the OS level, or on the board's sd card controller.
SD card wear-levelling is usually supposed to be handled on the controller inside the SD card. SD cards aren't like having raw access to flash, you basically write over SPI and the controller in the SD card decides where to actually put it.
This talk about SD cards is really great and explains some of this:
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but what compute? what are they computing? The driving need for edge computing is low-latency. There just isn't the need for it in a restaurant. I do hope they're not doing real-time control of kitchen equipment via something in a container, containers in Linux are nowhere near deterministic enough. This strikes me as someone who is familiar with only web technologies but unfamiliar with control systems attempt…
Could you define what is not deterministic about containerized computing? Examples of things we are controlling are timers for food, cameras that can recognize and track food items, drying machines that will automatically trigger and fry fries.
Linux is general is not a real-time system, in that you cannot get deterministic response time from it.
For example I'm guessing it doesn't matter if one of your timers are a second late due to Linux deciding to swap a process out or prioritise some upgrade check but imagine if your time constraints were a lot tighter.
Similarly if you're attempting to track food on a conveyor belt and Linux decides to prioritise the file indexer on your filesystem... oops, a lettuce has been thrown on the floor.
Real-time operating systems exist for a reason.
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#194Can anyone explain what the actual problem is they're solving using 'edge computing'? I get the feeling this is a completely unnecessary use of technology.
I've worked in a fast food restaurant and one of the key pieces of information we used was something called a "drop chart".
This was basically a printed out excel sheet with predicted amounts of food to keep ready to serve.
i.e. between 5pm-6pm have 12 chicken breasts already cooked. People follow these charts to know how much stock to pre-cook before the hour basically.
These predictions are usually based on previous years sales for that same day/time + growth + whatever other inputs to the sheet.
It sounds like what they're trying to do is run ML models and make really fast predictions in real time to react to surges of customers. To me this sounds a lot smarter than the approach I worked with.
From my experience when the numbers were off you either generate a lot of waste product or you make customers wait really long.
I imagine the inputs to the ML model are probably something like real time sales data + whatever else.
I think you'd want edge compute here not just for latency but for availability.
You'd want to both run these models fast and make sure even if the crappy internet connection of the restaurant dies you can keep providing these numbers.
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#195Can anyone explain what the actual problem is they're solving using 'edge computing'? I get the feeling this is a completely unnecessary use of technology.
>In a recent post, we shared about how we do bare metal clustering for Kubernetes on-the-fly at the Edge in our restaurants. One of the most common (and best) questions we got was “but why?”. In the post we will answer that question. [emphasis mine] Luckily there's a whole article on that topic. I try to avoid "Did you read the article?" comments, but the first three sentences in the article tell you that this is the…
No, there is some hand-waving about "kitchen equipment" and "low latency".
No business case for avoiding more traditional architecture.
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a custom piece of software that powers a display in the car, syncs and plays my music, and logs GPS. It also can manage audio and video recording and is intended to handle some future features[1] I have planned, so I wanted to over-spec rather than under-spec. [1] It's the same software that runs my home automation system, so an inevitable feature is my car and home units interacting, I wrote half of a piece o…
What's the power draw like? I once left the reading lights on; car was supposed to have turned it off when the doors locked, but somehow didn't. I found myself calling AAA in the morning to get a jumpstart.
Also curious, does GP have some way to shutdown gracefully when the car turns off, and reboot fast when it turns on? You could potentially handle this with a laptop and some battery-settings but not aware of an external battery solution for the NUC.
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#197Can anyone explain what the actual problem is they're solving using 'edge computing'? I get the feeling this is a completely unnecessary use of technology.
I've worked in a fast food restaurant and one of the key pieces of information we used was something called a "drop chart". This was basically a printed out excel sheet with predicted amounts of food to keep ready to serve. i.e. between 5pm-6pm have 12 chicken breasts already cooked. People follow these charts to know how much stock to pre-cook before the hour basically. These predictions are usually based on previou…
ML implies lots of training data. That gets done centrally as it would need to be done in aggregate.
You don't have low-latency training of a model and use that same model in real-time.
And in your example (admittedly small scale) 12 items of data an hour is not exactly high-data-rate, not enough to justify racks of machines.
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
>In a recent post, we shared about how we do bare metal clustering for Kubernetes on-the-fly at the Edge in our restaurants. One of the most common (and best) questions we got was “but why?”. In the post we will answer that question. [emphasis mine] Luckily there's a whole article on that topic. I try to avoid "Did you read the article?" comments, but the first three sentences in the article tell you that this is the…
No, there is some hand-waving about "kitchen equipment" and "low latency". No business case for avoiding more traditional architecture.
We have frequent internet outages and still need to run compute loads at the edge.
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't most modern SD cards contain some wear leveling logic? I did a bunch of research on this a while back and the conclusion I found was: yes, but buy name-brand better rated cards to avoid cheapo cards that do not do wear leveling or do it very badly. It's nowhere near as good as SSD drives, but it's better than just a naked flash chip... unless I'm wrong.
Yes, but it's not enough. Even the brand name cards aren't worth shit; you need to buy "industrial" cards. Source: tried to get a root filesystem to work on name brand SD cards for a high availability product.
Have you tried things like jffs2? Do they help?
Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose I'm struggling to see how much of a requirement for low-latency data processing exists in a restaurant. There just isn't that much data there unless they're attempting to do real-time control of equipment (in which case, just use a regular control system). I can imagine a requirement for logging potentially, but thats not a low-latency requirement and the use-case for edge-computing is exactly that, low-lat…
It’s more about network outages than latency specifically... although in several remote locations latency is permanently low due to slow providers.
But again, latency of what?
Requirement for low-latency implies a use of data that is time-sensitive.
What time-sensitive data is there in a single chicken restaurant??